The Port Chicago explosion was the deadliest home-front disaster of World War II, and it gave rise to the largest mutiny trial in U.S. naval history, yet it remains unknown to most Americans. In 1944 hundreds of men were killed and injured in the huge blast at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California. Most of the casualties were African-American seamen, many in their teens, who were assigned exclusively to loading ammunition.
At a moment in history when dramatic war events were daily front-page news, the explosion and ensuing mutiny trial soon virtually were lost to memory. But they would contribute to major changes in racial policy and practices in the Navy, the U.S. military, and American society.
Dangerous Duty at Port Chicago
With the outbreak of war in the Pacific, the need for a major ammunition transshipment facility on the West Coast became urgent, and a site was proposed near the small town of Port Chicago, California. The location, on Suisun Bay in the Sacramento River, was 25 to 30 miles from the major population centers of San Francisco and Oakland, yet had access to train transport and a deepwater port. Construction started in February 1942, and the first ammunition ship began loading on 8 December. Port Chicago became the most important ammunition-handling facility on the West Coast.
By July 1944, Navy personnel at Port Chicago included 1,431 black enlisted sailors (all of the ammunition loaders were black) and 71 officers (all white). This was standard policy in the racially discriminatory Navy of the time, in which no black sailor could expect to rise above the level of petty officer. Racial segregation was the policy throughout the U.S. military. The ammunition handlers—chiefly draftees and volunteers in their teens and early 20s—were organized into work divisions. Each division consisted of about 125 seamen and was headed by white lieutenants, with black petty officers acting as foremen of the work gangs. The men were housed in segregated barracks. In addition, some 106 Marines guarded the base and 231 civilians were employed mainly as skilled workers, such as carpenters, locomotive engineers, and equipment operators. All of these persons were white.
Loading went on around the clock in three shifts. On the loading pier the usual practice was to assign one work division to each ship being loaded. Two ships could be loaded simultaneously, one on each side of the pier. The loading division was broken into five work gangs, one for each of the ship’s hatches/holds. The gangs were in turn divided into two squads, one on the pier and one in the ship’s hold. In addition, one man was assigned to operate the winch for the hold and one man would act as hatch attendant to signal the winch operator when a load was to be lifted.
Ammunition and bombs were brought onto the pier in railroad boxcars from munitions plants in Nevada. The munitions included everything from small-arms ammunition to artillery projectiles, depth charges, incendiary bombs, and huge blockbusters weighing as much as 2,000 pounds each. One or two men were assigned to “break out” the car, using a sledgehammer and pinch bar to remove dunnage that shored up the bombs. The rest of the squad would then manhandle the bombs onto the pier. Large bombs were rolled down an incline or removed by electric “mules”; small bombs and boxes of ammunition might be passed by hand or transported by hand trucks. The bombs and ammunition were placed in nets or on pallets, hoisted by one of the ship’s booms and winches, and lowered through a hatch into a hold, where another squad stowed the load and braced it with dunnage. Layer by layer the bombs would rise from the bottom of the hold to the hatch high above. During these operations, the pier was crowded with boxcars, tons of munitions, and working men.
From the outset the new base was under pressure to continually increase its output in response to wartime needs. In May 1944, the loading platform, originally built to accommodate one ship, was widened to allow two ships to be loaded simultaneously, which sharply increased the number of men, machines, and munitions on the pier at one time, consequently increasing work hazards.
Despite the risks, none of the enlisted men and very few of the officers had any training or experience handling ammunition. No such training was provided at Great Lakes Naval Training Station or at Port Chicago. Many of the officers were reservists called to active duty from civilian life and given scant training of any sort. Most had no experience with commanding recruits. Sailors at Port Chicago were expected to learn their job by simply watching experienced workers. Initially fearful of explosives, new arrivals learned to discount the danger; the officers assured them that the bombs could not explode accidentally because their detonators had not been installed. When minor accidents resulted in no explosions, the sense of danger was minimized and jokes were made about who would be the first or the last out of the ship’s hold if something went wrong.
For a while a Coast Guard detail was posted on the pier to ensure safe loading practices, but it was withdrawn when Navy commanders rejected that service’s safety recommendations.
Picking Up the Pace
The urgent wartime need for munitions translated into a rapid work pace. Captain Nelson Goss, the commanding officer of Mare Island Naval Station, of which Port Chicago was a subcommand, required that loading crews achieve a goal of ten tons per hatch per hour of loading. In practice this was seldom achieved. During the court of inquiry that investigated the explosion, there would be considerable debate as to whether such a goal was unreasonably high and may have encouraged unsafe practices and rough handling.
The pressure to increase tonnage output became more intense in April 1944, when Captain Merrill T. Kinne came aboard as officer in charge of Port Chicago. Kinne initiated the practice of posting daily rates of loading for each division on a blackboard in the dock office. The captain later explained that he got the idea from Navy target-practice competition, in which the number of shots fired and hits made were similarly recorded. Apparently there was no discussion of whether competition in loading munitions might lead to rushing and unsafe practices. Junior officers felt pressured to get good tonnage figures, and they pushed the loaders to work harder. As one sailor later reported: “You always knew what the division did in front of you. If they put on x number of tons that meant you had to do more.”
The sailors were goaded into competition by threats of punishment and promises of rewards. The officers sometimes bet on which division would load the most tonnage. Whenever Seaman Joseph Small, a 23-year-old farm boy–turned–truck driver who was regarded as an informal leader by many of the younger sailors, complained to his commanding officer that the pace of work was creating greater danger, he would be reminded that the bombs were unarmed and could not explode.
In this regard, it is worth noting that the International Longshore and Warehouse Union warned the Navy of the danger of an explosion if it continued to use untrained sailors to load ammunition. The waterfront union would not allow a winch driver to work on ammunition until he had years of experience with other loads. The practice at Port Chicago was to permit a man to operate a winch after only a few days’ training, and sometimes with none at all. The union proposed sending experienced longshoremen to train the Navy recruits in safe handling of ammunition, but Captain Goss ignored the offer. He wanted nothing to do with civilian stevedores who would be under the influence of militant union leaders.
Goss was also not happy with the black enlisted men sent to Port Chicago, whom he regarded as troublesome, possibly under subversive influence, and capable of only 60 percent of the efficiency of white workers. For their part, many of the black sailors were disturbed by the racial segregation and discrimination evident in the organization of the base. Why were only blacks assigned to loading ammunition, they asked. No satisfactory answer was forthcoming.
Like One Giant Bomb
The fateful moonless night of 17 July 1944 was clear and cool. Two cargo ships were tied up at the Port Chicago pier, and under floodlights the loading of one of them was nearly finished. The Liberty ship E. A. Bryan had been moored at Port Chicago for four days. Some 98 enlisted men of Division Three were hard at work loading the vessel, and by 2200 the Bryan was packed with 4,600 tons of munitions, including 1,780 tons of high explosives.
The loading of the ship was not without problems. The crank bearing on the Bryan’s No. 2 winch had failed, as had a valve on her No. 4 winch; both were replaced. Several days earlier, a winch operator had reported that the brake on the ship’s No. 1 winch was stuck in the “off” position. As long as there was steam pressure, the winches could be controlled without use of the brake. The third mate informed the chief engineer of the problem, but it is not known if the brake was repaired. That night the No. 1 hold was being loaded with incendiary bombs weighing 650 pounds each. Known as “hot cargo” because they had detonators installed, these bombs were being loaded gingerly, one at a time. Failure of the winch could be disastrous since it might result in a load falling onto the pier or into the hold, setting off an explosion.
The second vessel, the brand new Victory ship Quinault Victory, had arrived that evening. Some 102 men of the Sixth Division, many only recently arrived at Port Chicago, were busy rigging the ship in preparation for loading to begin at midnight. Meanwhile, the pier was bustling with 16 railroad boxcars, a locomotive, about 430 tons of ammunition and bombs of all sizes, and men scrambling about everywhere.
Shortly after 2218 disaster struck. Two explosions occurred within seconds of each other. The first, smaller blast appeared to happen on the pier. This was quickly followed by a cataclysmic explosion as the E. A. Bryan detonated like one gigantic bomb, sending a column of fire and smoke 12,000 feet into the night sky. The pilot of an Army Air Forces plane passing nearby at 9,000 feet reported seeing pieces of glowing metal “as big as a house or a garage” thrown well above the altitude of his aircraft. A seismograph at the University of California at Berkeley registered a jolt that had the force of a small earthquake. Startled citizens were awakened throughout the Bay area; windows were broken as far away as San Francisco.
The Bryan was literally blown to bits; very few large pieces of wreckage were found. The Quinault Victory was lifted clear of the water and broken into pieces. The next morning her stern could be seen protruding upside down from the water.
Everyone on the two ships, the pier, and a Coast Guard fire barge tied to the pier was killed instantly—320 men, some 202 of whom were ammunition loaders. Only 51 bodies were recovered sufficiently intact to be identified. Another 390 military personnel and civilians were injured, including 233 enlisted men in their barracks. No one was killed in the nearby town of Port Chicago, but 109 townspeople were injured, and damage to homes and businesses was extensive.
The Navy base was reduced to shambles, but there was no panic. The survivors picked themselves up, organized rescue efforts, helped the injured, and put out fires started by flaming debris.
Search for Answers
Four days after the Port Chicago disaster, on 21 July, a U.S. Navy court of inquiry was convened to investigate “the circumstances attending the explosion.” The court was composed of three senior naval officers and a judge advocate, who assembled evidence and witnesses for interrogation. Both Captain Goss and Captain Kinne were present throughout the proceedings as “interested parties,” which meant they would be allowed to present evidence and examine witnesses “in the same manner as a defendant.” But they were not defendants. No officer was in any way held accountable for the disaster.
The question of Kinne’s tonnage-figures blackboard and the competition it encouraged came up during the proceedings. The captain attempted to justify the scoreboard as simply an extension of the Navy’s competitive target-practice routine. He contended that it did not negatively impact safety and implied that junior officers who said it did were wrong. The question of officers betting on tonnage loaded by work divisions did not come up.
While the officers sought to evade responsibility for the disaster, it became clear that the issues of safety and lack of training could not be avoided. During the following months the Navy hastened to establish safety procedures for handling munitions and instituted formal training for enlisted men and officers who were assigned to this work.
The court also heard testimony concerning possible causes of the explosion, but a specific cause was never officially established, mainly because anyone in a position to see what had happened did not live to tell about it. Nevertheless, the judge advocate, Lieutenant Commander Keith Ferguson, argued that the black sailors were responsible:
The consensus of opinion of the witnesses—and practically admitted by the interested parties—is that the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally or intellectually capable of handling high explosives. . . . These men, it is testified, could not understand the orders which were given to them and the only way they could be made to understand what they should do was by actual demonstration. . . . It is an admitted fact, supported by the testimony of the witnesses, that there was rough and careless handling of the explosives being loaded aboard ships at Port Chicago.
Although there was testimony before the court about competition in loading, this was not listed in the findings as a possible cause of the explosion. Yet in a slap on the wrists of the officers, the court saw fit to recommend that “the loading of explosives should never be a matter of competition.” The court of inquiry in effect exonerated the officers of any responsibility for the disaster, and in so far as any specific human cause was invoked the burden was laid on the black sailors who died in the explosion.
Plight of the Survivors
Meanwhile, Navy construction battalions (Seabees) had been brought in to rebuild the base. Most of the surviving black sailors, whose barracks had been wrecked, were transferred to other bases including Mare Island. Many of these men were in a state of shock, anxious and fearful of another explosion. How had bombs, which they were told could not explode without detonators, suddenly exploded? They hoped to be granted “survivors’ leave” to visit their families, as some of the officers were, but this did not happen, adding to the tension. They also hoped to be transferred to other work, but they were told nothing.
On 8 August, a ship docked at Mare Island to be loaded with bombs and ammunition. The next day when the enlisted men of the Second, Fourth, and Eighth divisions were ordered to march to the loading pier to begin work, the great majority balked, stopping in their tracks. There was no violence or physical threats against the officers. The men simply stopped marching. After some confusion, as the officers harangued and cajoled the men, 258 of them continued to refuse to go to the pier, most saying they feared another explosion. They were willing to obey all orders—except to load bombs and ammunition. These men were marched to a barge where they were imprisoned for several days. Meanwhile, experienced civilian stevedores were hastily hired to load the ship.
Some of the enlisted men, including Joe Small, linked the cause of the explosion to the working conditions on the pier. For them the idea of returning to the same work under the same conditions—competition, rushing—under the same officers was intolerable. Small recounted:
I was a winch operator on the ship, and I missed killing a man on the average of once a day—killing or permanently injuring a man. And it was all because of rushing, speed. I didn’t want to go back to this. This was my reason for refusing to go back to work—to get the working conditions changed. I realized I had to work. I wasn’t trying to shirk work. I don’t think these other men were trying to shirk work. But to go back to work under the same conditions, with no improvements, no changes, the same group of officers that we had, was just—we thought there was a better alternative, that’s all.
Tension was high among the men on the barge. Tempers flared. Fights broke out over whether they should go back to work. Worried that fighting could lead to a confrontation with the Marines guarding the prison barge, Joe Small called a meeting and told the men to “knock off the horseplay” and obey the guards and avoid getting into trouble. He said the officers wanted the men to “mess up” so the officers could “call in the Marines.” Small explained: “If we obey the shore patrol and the officers and don’t get into any trouble, they can’t do anything to us. We’ve got the officers by the balls—they can do nothing to us if we don’t do anything to them. If we stick together they can’t do anything to us.”
In civilian life, Small’s passive noncooperation might be called a strike or an act of civil disobedience, but in the Navy there was no such thing. However, the fact that he called a meeting and urged the sailors to stick together would become known to officers.
On 11 August, Rear Admiral Carleton Wright, commandant of the 12th Naval District, which included Port Chicago, addressed the 258 men assembled in a field. He berated them as cowards and warned them that “mutinous conduct in time of war carries the death sentence, and the hazards of facing a firing squad are far greater than the hazards of handling ammunition.” The mention of “mutinous conduct” and the death threat shocked the sailors; they had not thought of their actions as mutinous.
The men were told to separate into two groups: those willing to obey all orders and those not willing. It was a confusing and emotional moment. Several young seamen openly wept as they chose sides, two brothers separated and took opposite positions, many other men vacillated going first to one group then the other. Some were told what group to go to. In the end 50 men, including Small, were in the “unwilling” group.
The 208 men in the “willing” group did not return to work. Instead they were given summary courts-martial, were briefly imprisoned before receiving bad-conduct discharges, and forfeited three months’ pay.
A ‘Mutinous Conspiracy’
As for the 50, they were charged with conspiring to make a mutiny and brought to trial. On 14 September, the general courts-martial opened at the Treasure Island Naval Station in San Francisco Bay. The court, which was both judge and jury, consisted of seven senior naval officers. The judge advocate, or prosecutor in the case, was Lieutenant Commander James F. Coakley, formerly an assistant district attorney in Oakland. The defense was handled by five young lieutenants headed by Gerald F. Veltmann. Coakley called several officers to recount the events of the work stoppage. Some enlisted men from the group of 208 who had agreed to return to work, but were now themselves imprisoned, were called to testify that Small had organized a “mutinous conspiracy” on the barge and urged the men to stick together.
For its part, the defense objected to the mutiny charge, pointing out that the legal definition of mutiny was an “unlawful opposition or resistance to or defiance of, superior military authority with a deliberate purpose to usurp, subvert or override the same.” Veltmann argued that there was no deliberate intent by the enlisted men to seize power from the officers. He said the men were fearful of returning to the same work but there was no violence and they obeyed all other orders. As for the “mutinous conspiracy” meeting, Small testified that he had been trying to keep order and prevent violence.
On 24 October, after only 80 minutes of deliberation, the court found all 50 of the accused guilty of mutiny. All were sentenced to prison for 15 years and then to be dishonorably discharged from the Navy. By the end of November, the 50 men were serving their sentences at Terminal Island Prison at San Pedro, California.
The Navy on Trial
When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York had learned of the upcoming mutiny courts-martial, future U.S. Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall was dispatched to investigate. He was then head of the NAACP’s legal branch and dealt with incidents of racial discrimination in the military. Over 12 days Marshall observed the trial (which was open to the press), interviewed the accused men, and learned of the conditions at Port Chicago. He was appalled. Marshall told reporters that the accused men “are being tried for mutiny solely because of their race and color.” The Navy is also on trial, he said, “for its whole vicious policy toward Negroes.”
In a letter to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Marshall asked, among other questions, why only blacks were assigned to loading ammunition, why the men were not given training for the work, why competition in loading was allowed, and why the men were not granted survivors’ leaves. Forrestal refused to answer questions about training and competition, stating they were based on “conjecture,” and his answers to other questions were evasive. Meanwhile, the secretary informed President Franklin D. Roosevelt that, in order “to avoid any semblance of discrimination against negroes [sic],” orders were going out requiring the formation of two work divisions composed of white enlisted sailors to work on loading ammunition at Port Chicago and Mare Island. It was a first, mostly cosmetic, step; black and white sailors would load ammunition at the base—but not in the same work units.
The explosion and highly publicized courts-martial focused attention on the issue of racial discrimination in the Navy. After the convictions, angry editorials appeared in the black and liberal press, and letters and petitions of protest showed up in the mail at the Pentagon. Under Forrestal’s guidance, in October 1944 restrictions were lifted on the use of black personnel, allowing commanders to assign black sailors “as they see fit.”
Meanwhile, the NAACP circulated petitions calling for overturning the mutiny convictions. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt was prominent among the supporters of the campaign. In April 1945, Thurgood Marshall submitted an appeal brief, arguing that there was no mutiny and that the charge of mutiny was racially motivated. “Justice can only be done in this case,” he wrote, “by a complete reversal of findings.” Sentences for some of the men were reduced, but there was no exoneration. In June the Navy announced that it was discontinuing racial segregation in its training stations and other shore facilities, and by 1946 Navy ships were being desegregated.
In January 1946, Forrestal’s office announced that under a general amnesty some 1,700 imprisoned servicemen were being released, among them the Port Chicago men. However, those sailors had to complete a year of “rehabilitation” by serving in the crews of U.S. Navy ships. Ironically, they served in racially integrated crews, although they had no idea that their work stoppage had anything to do with this fact. Given general discharges, the men returned to their homes and their lives, but the mutiny convictions remained on their records.
In less than two years the Navy had become the first branch of the armed forces to adopt and begin systematically implementing a policy of desegregation. When President Harry S. Truman ordered the desegregation of all U.S. armed forces in 1948, he knew that the Navy had already led the way in showing that racial desegregation of the military could be accomplished without race riots or other violence. Indeed, the Navy announced that it was already in compliance with the order.
The subsequent desegregation of the military was experienced by millions of black and white Americans who saw that segregation and racial discrimination could be dismantled when there was leadership and a political will to do so. Segregation was not carved in stone—a fact that would be demonstrated by the U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation decision in 1954, the emergence of an interracial civil rights movement, and the passage of major civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Remembering Port Chicago’s Sailors
In the early 1990s, Congressman George Miller, whose district included Port Chicago, began pushing to clear the names of the convicted sailors. The Navy reviewed the convictions in 1994 but upheld the original guilty verdicts, claiming race was not a factor in the judgments. “The Navy keeps saying the trials were fair,” Miller said. “Well, the trials only took place because the sailors were African American.”
Later in the decade, Port Chicago survivor Freddie Meeks sought a presidential pardon, which President Bill Clinton granted in 1999. But another of the three survivors alive at the time declined, saying he would not ask to be pardoned for a crime he did not commit.
Undaunted by his earlier setback, Congressman Miller launched a campaign in 2006 to make the site of the Port Chicago explosion a national park, and three years later President Barack Obama signed the authorizing legislation. The Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial serves as a reminder of those who died in the Port Chicago disaster as well as those who worked there—including the enlisted men who engaged in the work stoppage, protesting unsafe work conditions.
Although 50 of these men were charged with and convicted of mutiny (and the remaining 208 convicted of lesser charges), the Navy acted quickly in the wake of the courts-martial. It set up proper training for ammunition handlers and ended its policy of racial segregation and discrimination—not only at Port Chicago, but at all of its facilities and ships—becoming the first branch of the U.S. military to desegregate.
Source:
This article is adapted from the author’s book, The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in U.S. Naval History (Warner Books, 1989; revised edition, Heyday, 2006).